Louis Kornitzer | Gem Trader | Selling Diamonds



	XVIII

	I Sell Diamonds: Contrast in Methods I n Chapter XV I told you that I "broke" three times into diamond-trading. The third occasion was when I was introduced to a prominent Antwerp diamond cutter in New York. For some reason he took to me, perhaps because I visited him in a nursing-home when he was bored and ill. At any rate, he pressed me to come and see him when I reached Europe, and four weeks later I sat in the great man's office in the Rue Coquilhat in Antwerp. He was a prince among men, although he could scarcely write his own name, and the outcome of our chance acquaintance was that I was associated with him over a period of six years, during which time my firm distributed throughout China, Indo-China, Japan, the Philippines and Malaya the stones which were cut in my principal's Antwerp establishment. The strangest thing about it all was that he knew nothing about me; almost equally strange was the fact that although he had the larg- 192